SND35: Meet the Best of Digital Design judges

The backbone of SND35 digital judging is, of course, the judges. Along with the coordinators of this year’s event in Indianapolis, these professionals have sorted through and evaluated entries from publications worldwide and across platforms. Who are these design gurus? Find out here:

Q: What do you do when you’re in a creative funk?
A: Take a pencil and paper, draw doodles.

Q: What is your best piece of advice?
A: Edit and edit.

Q: What’s your favorite design tool, and why?
A: A whiteboard, where you can draw without fear because you can always get rid of everything and start again.

Q: If you could have coffee with any person, living or dead, who would it be and why?
A: I’m quite shy. I guess I would end up having coffee with someone I admire we won’t talk much. So I’d rather go with someone I already know and have fun.

Len DeGroot is director of data visualization at The Los Angeles Times

Q: What do you do when you’re in a creative funk?
A: Take a walk.

Q: What is your best piece of advice?
A: Edit to the point of discomfort.

Q: What’s your favorite design tool, and why?
A: Pencil and paper because I can iterate quickly through multiple designs before starting to build.

Q: If you could have coffee with any person, living or dead, who would it be and why?
A: Howard Zinn. Would love to get his take on modern events.

Q: What do you do when you’re in a creative funk?
A: I stop thinking about it. I take a walk, read the news, or look at random things on the Internet. Then come back with a fresh look at what was giving me problems.

Q: What is your best piece of advice?
A: Don’t hold yourself back.

Q: What’s your favorite design tool, and why?
A: A graphing notebook. Dot grid, white lines, or just a normal graphing notebook, the ability to sketch with gridlines to guide you makes sketches look clean and proportional, but give you the freedom to draw whatever you’d like, uninhibited by technology.

Q: If you could have coffee with any person, living or dead, who would it be and why?
A: This one’s tough — there’s too many great people I’d love to meet. Even fictional ones too.

Alex Bordens is assistant editor of news applications at The Chicago Tribune

Q: What do you do when you’re in a creative funk?
A: Listen to Notorious B.I.G.

Q: What is your best piece of advice?
A: Challenge yourself to learn new things and stick with it.

Q: What’s your favorite design tool, and why?
A: Pencil and paper. It’s easy to quickly bounce between ideas and collaborate. Any detailed mockup implies a defined starting point. A blank piece of paper will never do that.

Q: If you could have coffee with any person, living or dead, who would it be and why?
A: James Bond.

Q: What do you do when you’re in a creative funk?
A: Fix small things. Little bugs, little things that have annoyed me, a wrong color, an old icon, a broken link. Tiny becomes big. Keeping active, the brain weaves. New connections and pathways are activated and creativity ensues.

Q: What is your best piece of advice?
A: 1) Don’t listen to pundits on journalism. The people most vocal about where journalism should go have the least responsibility to take us there. 2) Assholes, idiots and devil’s advocates are everywhere. Learn how to deal with them or they’ll plague you forever. 3) It’s easy to say yes. Yes to another assignment, yes to an early deadline, yes to a bad idea, yes, yes, yes. Yes traps your life into appeasing other for ideas you don’t enjoy. Learn to say no. 4) Make time for your own success. No one else will. 5) Be loud. Never be afraid to stand up for your ideas or beliefs. 6) Never stop learning. 7) Have multiple skills. You’ll be happier and more hireable. 8) Move your feet. Expirement. Fail. And you will fail. Learn to fail fast, fail faster, fail better. Fail until you succeed. 9) Find a mentor. Absorb as much from them as possible. 10) Be the future. Journalism is in a state of disruption. You have the power to mold where we go. Stand up. Change journalism and in so doing change the world.

Q: What’s your favorite design tool, and why?
A: Javascript

Q: If you could have coffee with any person, living or dead, who would it be and why?
A: Ben Franklin. Beers. Innovation.